


second-hand emotion

by revanchist



Series: afterthoughts [2]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Temporary Amnesia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:56:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28297134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/revanchist/pseuds/revanchist
Summary: Kent lets Jack in because what’s he going to do, leave him standing on the porch? No.
Relationships: Kent "Parse" Parson/Jack Zimmermann
Series: afterthoughts [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1822405
Comments: 28
Kudos: 73





	second-hand emotion

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for being patient with me. :) This story will span three chapters and cover four days. I tried to keep the schedule vaguely realistic, but narrative needs must, etc. 
> 
> Much like [afterthoughts](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25156672), this exists in conversation with [quarter-life closure](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26466187), but does not presuppose the same history or canon interpretation. 
> 
> Title from Tina Turner's What's Love Got to Do with It. The [Kygo remix](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNYGLMQxZ64) featured heavily on my writing playlist.

### SUNDAY.

Kent lets Jack in because what’s he going to do, leave him standing on the porch? No. 

The problem is that it leaves Jack standing in his foyer instead. That’s not much better. Kent feels wrung out, like he hasn’t slept in two days. He has slept in two days, he’s not an idiot. He was exactly that idiot but he’s aged out of it. 

The feeling is there, though. He feels a little wild, a little unreal. Like if he pushes on the wall his hand will go through it. He puts his hands in the pocket of his hoodie so he won’t try and touch anything. Anyone. Jack, specifically, not like there’s anyone else here to touch.

It’s been three days. Jack looks okay. The bump on the side of his head seems to be going down. Kent wants to probe it with his fingers and make sure, but he’s not sure what the protocol is, here. Seems like a bad idea to test it. Better to let Jack set the play. He’s got his color back, at least, no longer sallow from lying in a hospital bed. Maybe he’s a little pale, actually. He did just get off a red-eye. Kent should probably stop staring.

“The kitchen’s through here,” he directs. Maybe he can keep trading one room for another until he figures out what to do. He’s going to run out of rooms pretty quick, though. If he had thought ahead, he’d have bought one of those fuck-off money mansions littering the valley. Would have come in handy for exactly this situation. 

He wants to look back to make sure Jack is following, which is dumb. Obviously Jack is following. He didn’t come out here just to turn back around, at least not before Kent does something to scare him away. Besides, Kent can hear his steps. Jack’s got his outside shoes on. He doesn’t remember that Kent prefers people to take their outdoor shoes off. It seems insurmountable to explain that right now, also stupid. It doesn’t really matter. The house gets cleaned every week. 

Kent kind of wants a beer, but it’s like. Eight in the morning, and he’s _really_ not that idiot anymore. He sits down at the kitchen counter instead, feet kicking at the side of it until he notices and stops. Jack puts his bag down and remains standing. He hasn’t said anything. He didn’t even say hello before he started off in French. Typical. 

I want to remember you. What does that even mean?

Kent opens his mouth and asks, “How are you feeling?” before he can stop himself. Motherfucker.

Jack hesitates for a moment, but he doesn’t look annoyed? That’s a good sign. Kent isn’t sure what he’s working with here. When is he ever.

“I’m doing better than I was,” Jack says. “Head’s not so bad now. Apart from, you know.”

Kent does not know. Kent has a three-day-old doctor’s report and a series of text messages from Alicia Zimmermann. Kent has texted back _thanks for the update_ four separate times. 

Kent has drawn his own conclusions. The Ace’s orthopedist deciphered the medical terminology for him before last night’s game. He said, _Kent you gotta be prepared_. He didn’t have any suggestions as to how. 

There’s never been a time Kent didn’t want Jack in his life, but there’s been plenty of times it was a one-way street. He doesn’t want to be reintroduced to the Jack who didn’t tell him anything, who looked surprised every time Kent still knew how to read him, as though Kent’s entire career hadn’t been built around reading guys like him. As if Kent hadn’t gotten a high school degree in Jack Zimmermann when he should have been learning algebra. 

Jack answered the question. That might mean something, but it also might not.

“Good,” says Kent. “Glad to hear it.” He looks at the counter. He looks back at Jack. He wonders, _how many questions will I get?_ He settles on, “How long are you in town?”

“I don’t know,” Jack says slowly. “A little while I guess.” 

“A little while,” Kent repeats. “A little while, like...”

Jack shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans. Code yellow. “As long as it takes.” 

“So, you’re not going to play with it, then,” Kent confirms.

“No,” Jack says, frowning. 

“I was just confirming,” Kent says. It isn’t a question. It shouldn’t count. 

Jack opens his mouth again, and then he freezes. He closes his mouth around the not-sounds. Those stupid eyes of his are tracking something behind Kent’s head.

Kent turns to look, and they’ve got company: his rookie, who is pulling a clean shirt on over wet hair, and toeing on shoes without bothering to untie them. 

Right: another thing Jack won’t remember. Add it to the list.

“Sorry if we woke you up,” Kent says, pitching his voice to carry.

Nils looks curiously over at them. “Nah man, it’s cool. Was getting up anyway.”

“Give me a second,” Kent says to Jack, and slides off the stool.

Kent has spent the last two days trying not to have a full-on breakdown in front of his young and impressionable rookie, because it is not a great look. This is the first time he’s housed a rookie since 2017, and the less said about that, the better. He doesn’t need a repeat of 2017. Maybe they should stop giving him rookies. It seems to be a harbinger: Kent gets a roommate, gay drama ensues.

Nils Bergström is like, nineteen, even though he’s got four inches on Kent. He’s built like a brick wall and he’s got the square jaw and dirty blonde hair of half the Swedes in the league and a vanity six-pack because, nineteen. Not that Kent’s got room to speak. Anyway, he’s a good kid. He doesn’t deserve to be the unwilling audience to the Jack-and-Kent soap opera. 

“I’m going over to Baysie’s,” he announces. He’s peeking over Kent’s shoulder towards the kitchen. Gotta work on that poker face, Kent thinks. Can’t be their Iceberg if he can’t keep his cool. He meets Kent’s eyes and adds, awkwardly, “Unless, uh. You’re okay here, right?” 

“We’re fine,” Kent says, and smiles to sell it. “Sorry to spring this on you, but we’re going to have an extra house guest for,” who knows, “a couple of days. Jack wants to do some of his recovery here.”

“He’s okay, though?” Nils asks. He’s only met Jack a handful of times, and mostly on the ice, but he looks concerned. Fair enough: news travels fast in the league, separate conference or no. Good kid. Good head on his shoulders. 

“He’s getting there.” Kent’s not sure how much is public knowledge, but the kid deserves a little more, especially if Jack’s planning on staying over. “He’s having some memory issues. PCS.” 

Nils winces. “Shit,” he says. “I’ll uh, do my best to stay out of your way.”

“It’s your house too,” Kent insists. Then he thinks about it. “Though if you, uh.”

“Yeah, no, it’s cool,” Nils says, quickly. “I can crash with Baysie and Colin, no problem.”

“Right,” Kent says. It’s kind of a relief. “Cool.”

They stare at each other for a moment, and then Nils grins and chucks a thumb over his shoulder. “Let me grab my keys and I’m out.”

It had been enough of a story to go wider than hockey. Wider than sports. Scandal was like that. It made all sorts of dogs sit up and pay attention. Kent had gotten an interview with, of all places, _The New Yorker._ He’d never read the New Yorker in his life, except maybe as a kid in doctors’ waiting rooms, bruised up with some on-ice injury or another, flipping through disappointed at the cartoons. Eight months later he’d learned Jack had a subscription, physical copies and everything, which went to his Providence apartment. That figured, didn’t it.

The interview had been pretty standard, even though Kent’s life was maybe seventy percent of the way through a slow-motion implosion. It was a little odd to have your problems measured out in how many season ticket holders had canceled their packages but Kent had a GM who made sure Kent stayed on top of that kind of thing. The rate of cancelations had slowed down, which was nice. Kent was producing again. That always made it easier for people to like him.

All interviews followed a predictable pattern. There was a clear play: you met the writer, you did some sort of low-key activity with them. They asked their questions while you both pretended it wasn’t awkward as shit. Kent had vetoed mini-golf and the Strip’s newest sky lounge, so his agent had given up and made a reservation for brunch. It was hard to fuck up brunch.

There’d been this part right up at the end where the journalist had asked him, a low-key parting shot: _is it worth it?_ Kent had laughed easy and golden, scoffed and said _of course._ That was the one answer he knew by heart. He asked himself that question in the mirror every morning, _is it worth it, is this worth it._ Not a question. 

Jack hasn’t moved from the kitchen, which, well. He’s not great with new people, and they were part-way through a private conversation. Maybe Kent should have introduced them, but it’s too late now.

He’s looking at his hands. Out of his pockets, now. Maybe he’s counting new freckles. Not like he gets them, the asshole.

“Sorry,” Kent says. “You were saying. You’re staying for…”

“Kent,” Jack says, looking up, jaw set. “I’m here as long as you’ll have me.”

Well, that’s obviously a lie, Kent thinks. 

“If that’s okay,” Jack adds.

“Sure, that’s fine,” Kent says. “Plenty of space.”

Jack’s quiet for a moment. Kent’s alert. Kent’s rusty like it’s a skill he’s forgotten. Got too comfortable. Too used to this thing going well. You never see the bad hits coming.

“I want them back,” Jack says. “The memories. I could use the,” he pauses, “clarity.”

Clarity—can’t— _keep moving._ Kent’s voice is even as he says, “I’m sure it’s been difficult.”

Jack doesn’t take the bait. He inclines his head, but not enough for a nod. He says, “I’m sorry for what I said. In the hospital.”

“Sure,” Kent says. Even. “It’s fine.” It hadn’t felt fine. “I understand. It was a shock.”

When a body went into shock, it went cold and clammy. Trainers watched out for that, when a guy got injured. Kent hadn’t been injured; he hadn’t gone cold. He’d gone red hot. Hot in his throat and the back of his head and right between his eyes, too, for good measure. Like he’d swallowed a lit match and it’d gotten caught part-way down. He’d gotten out of there because he knew, he knew how he got, when he started feeling like that, too much, all at once, like it was overwhelming. His fight or flight instinct only went one way by itself. He had to force the other.

“And the uh. When I texted you.” Jack’s ears are pinking up, but he’s got this particular face on. He’s got a limited number of expressions. This one is pretty recognizable, for Kent and probably for most of the Falconer’s bench as well. He’s going to captain the two of them through this until he decides they’re done. 

“Right,” Kent says. “That.” 

Jack is looking mulish but he stops there and doesn’t say anything. And the thing is, right, that it’s not like, the worst idea. Just because it makes Kent feel like he’s back at age seventeen, eighteen, clutching at a flip phone hard enough to crack the casing—that’s not really pertinent, here. It’s probably the smart play. Jack has a brain injury. 

Kent’s seen concussions before. He’s seen a lot of injuries, actually. That’s hockey. Cracked collarbones and chipped teeth and wrenched ankles and blown-out knees and yeah. Concussions. 

He’s been pretty lucky: he’s fast, he keeps his head up. He’s gone head-first into the boards but never hard enough to have any lingering problems to show for it. He’s seen the guys who aren’t so lucky, though. So.

Jack may, should, will get his memories back. That’s what the doctors told the Zimmermanns, and Kent hasn’t taken biology since before he was in billets, so what the fuck does he know. The highly educated, highly compensated professionals expect that Jack will make a full recovery.

But what if he doesn’t.

“It’s probably the right call,” Kent says. He forces himself to smize, but look a little stern, too, like he’s taking this seriously. “You’ve got a lot going on right now. A step back is a good idea.” He pushes off the counter. He spreads his hands, palm up. Look ma, no secrets. “No need to rush.” 

“You,” Jack says, and then nothing else. Does he look confused or relieved? His shoulders have inched down from where they were. That’s—something. 

“We can take it day by day. Play it by ear.”

“Okay,” Jack says. It is and isn’t what Kent wants him to say, but it’s—what it is. “Okay.”

Right now, he’s not the guy Kent’s dating. It’s unfair, probably, for Kent to expect him to be that guy.

“Come on,” Kent says, after a minute. “I’ll give you the tour.”

Most people wouldn’t be having this problem, of course. Well, first of all most people didn’t have partners who played hockey for a living, and most hockey players even when they got concussed didn’t lose all of their memories from some arbitrary start date straight up to the present day, but put that aside for a minute. Most people didn’t have stretches of time in their relationships where their boyfriend, or their partner, or whatever, had thought they were—god, whatever it was, exactly, that Jack had spent years thinking he was. Or not thinking about him at all. That wasn’t a history most people shared, outside of tv shows which unexpectedly went on for an extra four seasons and needed to pad the runtime out. Kent was living some full-on Days of Our Lives shit. 

He had walked out of the hospital and gone to sit in the back of a cab and googled it, because that’s what he did when he had a problem that wasn’t about hockey.

It had taken him through the whole ride back to Logan. He’d taken a break in the airport lounge to make some calls because who else was going to do it, and then he’d gone right back to his phone on the plane. Scrolling, scrolling, ignoring the siren song of a lie-flat seat and a four hour nap. That had eaten up most of the flight, at least until he got distracted reading advice columns. It was always nice to see that he wasn’t the only one regularly fucking up, and in fact, the ways he was fucking up weren’t even that exotic or terrible, in the grand scheme of things, even if they felt like it when he was in the middle of them. 

Sometimes he fantasized about posting his own letter, not to an advice column, but maybe like, on Reddit. It was tempting to have it all streamed to him: You’re the Asshole, Not the Asshole. That was the kind of direct feedback that Kent could fuck with. He understood the court of public opinion. It was familiar, more straightforward and less stressful, to have strangers having opinions on his problems, rather than the ambiguity he got from the people who knew him. 

It would be a cop-out, though, probably. There was only one way to get stronger, which was to find what was hard and push yourself through it.

At some point his body wasn’t going to let him do that anymore. But not yet—not yet. 

Jack’s stepped into their—Kent’s bedroom. He’s looking at the left side table: the copy of Champlain’s Dream with a receipt hanging out at about the two-thirds mark. The spare pair of reading glasses in their case.

“This is mine,” he says. It’s not really a question.

Even so, Kent replies, “Yeah.”

Jack runs his hand across the top of the pillowcase. “Do I spend much time here?”

“Not really,” says Kent. “Schedule doesn’t allow it.”

“Off-season, though.”

“Part of it,” Kent allows. They steal days where they can: the one game per season that brings the Falconers to Vegas, and vice versa. Not much when you add it all up. Kent likes to joke that they’ll have more time once they retire. Jack hasn’t been in the league long enough to find jokes about retirement funny. He probably won’t find it funny now, either, if Kent tries to explain it. “It’s a busy time. We spent part of it here, part of it elsewhere. You went back to Quebec for a bit. I went to Biosteel. You know.” 

They’d spent two weeks in France, where Kent had never been, and both of their accents were—how did they say it— _bon à rien_. Jack had dragged him to see—ruins, churches, museums. Fields that had been battle-fields, once. Kent had liked the landscapes. They’d gotten wine-drunk every night and fucked in half-a-dozen different hotel beds. There was a photo of Kent, from that trip—well, there were plenty of them—sandwiched between two donkeys, some dumb chirp about hockey ass, being an ass man, in the tagline, that had done numbers on his Instagram. There were some private photos, too, from those hotel beds, that had never made their way online, and hopefully never would.

Kent says, "We do our best."

“Because I love you,” Jack clarifies, and Kent can—he can hear it: the doubt.

He turns away. Yes, he thinks, because you love me. What good is insisting on it going to do? He shrugs instead. “There’s a guest room down the hall.”

“Okay,” says Jack, stepping away from the bed. There’s relief, there. Okay. “Lead the way.”

Scraps, cheerful at the post-game scrum, Kent’s first game with the C back on his chest: _You gotta understand one thing about Parser_ — _he doesn’t like to be told no._

Well, who did?

He’s got to formulate a play before Jack finishes getting changed and comes downstairs. Time on the clock, ticking down. You don’t get to where Kent is without grace under pressure. He didn’t get here without learning how to roll with the fucking punches.

Jack steps into the kitchen in a fresh shirt. He’s probably scrubbed off the scent of sweat and recycled air. Kent smiles at him when he sees him, bright and wide, reflexive. It’s a habit he’s fallen back into. Jack sees it and stumbles. He looks—uncomfortable.

 _He loves me,_ Kent thinks. _He loves me._

There’s a younger Kent who would have cheerfully died, to know that the way Kent does. You can spend so much time wishing you had something: some kind of proof of existence, some evidence that what you want is possible, some sign that what you believe is true. You can spend so much time looking for it, searching, hunting, desperate. Some hidden trick that will make everything turn out alright. You can spend years on that, and at the end, you can still be left standing in your kitchen looking at—well.

That younger Kent thought love could be everything. 

Love can do a lot. But it can’t be everything.

“Freshened up?” asks Kent, fixing his smile in place. “We’ve got the day. I can show you around. Maybe it’ll spark something. Shake something loose.”

“Shake something loose,” Jack repeats. 

Kent shifts his weight back into his heels. Lifts one shoulder and drops it. “If that sounds good.”

“Not particularly,” says Jack. “I didn’t come here to see Las Vegas.”

“If you have a better idea,” says Kent, “I’m all ears.”

“I came here to see you,” says Jack. “I came here to understand. No one else knows anything. No one else could tell me anything.”

“I don’t know how to help you with that,” says Kent. “I don’t—I’m out of my depth here. I’m not a doctor.”

“I don’t want a doctor. I want to know what happened.”

“I’m not Wikipedia, either. If you want a timeline—”

Jack makes a noise of discontent, somewhere between a snort and a scoff. He shakes his head. He says, “I want to know what changed.”

Nothing changed, thinks Kent. You changed. Your mind changed. 

“I want to know what happened after the 2017 All-Star Game,” says Jack. “I know I came here. I want to know what happened next.”

“Jesus,” says Kent. “Yeah, you came here. You showed up at ass-o’clock in the morning and demanded I ask for a trade. We had a blow-out fight and you refused to fucking leave afterwards. It was a—it was a real—”

Breathe calm. Count to five. Uncurl your fists. Smile.

“It worked out,” he says. He chuckles. 

“Well,” Jack says, his eyes like twin blue searchlights, tight-shot to Kent’s own face, “that does make, uh, sense. I mean.” He winces. “It does, uh. Sound like me.”

Kent snorts for real this time. “Yeah. Old habits.” 

“Doesn’t look like you listened,” says Jack. “Old habit there too.” He hesitates. “And then what?”

“You went back to Providence,” says Kent. “You kept calling.”

“You picked up,” says Jack. 

“Old habits,” says Kent.

Easy with hindsight to see that it would’ve been a bust for Jack to come to the Aces. He wasn’t built for Sunbelt hockey. He wasn’t built for a city like Vegas with every spotlight trained like a sniper scope, and playing on ice was a dare you made against the heat. If you wanted to succeed in Vegas, you learned to play the hand you were dealt.

Carly, who had stopped touching him, stopped talking to him when the news broke, but had still gone out and done his level best to put one of Chicago’s Finest through the boards when they’d mouthed off about Parser in his earshot. Minty, who’d told Kent to his face he was rooting for him to get traded, then stopped every single shot on goal in their last chance game to cinch a 2017 wild-card spot. That was Kent’s team. He’d spent years with those boys, building them up. He’d dropped gloves for them. He’d taken hard hits. This was just another hit in a string of them. It came with the territory.

He didn’t need to spend the rest of his time explaining why. Jack didn’t get it. Hadn’t gotten it. Still doesn’t, really. Sometime in the past decade he’s forgotten the lessons they’d learned in the Q. That’s okay. He’s learned other things, in college or wherever. He’s learned how to be happy pretty consistently, which is cool, and that alone makes Kent pretty consistently happy, as a result. It’s okay that Jack went somewhere where things worked out. The Falconers have a good room. They’re kind of the odd ones out in the league, but it’s cool that Jack has a place where he can be his weird self, and not have it be an issue, or an _Issue._

Kent isn’t in the Falconers room, though. Kent was drafted in Aces black and gold, and Kent is going to spend however many good years he has left doing everything in his power to retire in those colors. There aren’t a lot of guys who’ve earned their letters twice. Even less who’ve done it twice on the same team. Sometimes he daydreams that they’ll retire #90 with him, jersey with the C still on it. That would be something.

Some guys get traded and learn to make a new place. Kent’s never been traded. He’s never been sent down. He knows how lucky that is. He knows what it’s cost him to keep it that way. A fuckload of work. Off-topic. The point is that he can’t really imagine it: untangling himself from his team. Untangling himself from this city. One day he may have to. He doesn’t like to think about that.

He’s the same about Jack. 

It’s not so different, in his head. Kent’s—well, Jack’s decided to be with him twice. 

But he’s walked away twice, too. 

Kent left himself open to it, both times: empty netter for Jack to score on; defense hardly putting up a fight. 

You don’t play to defend against an own-goal though, and Jack’s his team. Has been since Kent first earned a spot on his wing, even before—all the rest of it, all that came after that. 

They end up going for that drive anyway, because Kent can’t be stuck in the house. He’s got energy licking underneath his skin. The sort of mood where, when he was five years younger, he’d be charming his way into a pool party, day-drinking under the sun. As it is, they rack up a $300 bill on things he doesn’t need. Kent’s been on the same meal service since he was seventeen, but he’s never outgrown the comfortable thrill of walking into a grocery store and buying whatever overpriced dumbfuck shit his heart desires. 

It gives them both something to focus on: Jack squinting at the two different kinds of coconut water Kent has put into the cart. One kind’s for smoothies and one isn’t. “Why’s it pink?” he asks, and then before Kent can answer, he’s answering his own question: “Antioxidants.”

“Yeah,” Kent says, “we’ve had this conversation.” That’s a good sign, isn’t it? “You’re—remembering something?”

Jack pauses in the middle of the aisle. “Just that,” he says. He shakes his head. “It just came to me. I knew it.”

“What’d I tell you,” says Kent. “Shaking something loose. God bless Whole Foods.”

“Sure,” says Jack. He looks over at the kombucha. "A real breakthrough."

A whole lotta small talk gets them through the afternoon. Kent drives around for a while. He gives Jack the locals’ tour. He used to dream about giving Jack this tour, his whole first season, his second, his third. He studied the city like a cartographer building a map, trying to secret out every off-beat diamond in the rough. As though there was some cheat code, some combination of perfect places to convince Jack that this could be, for both of them, a home.

He never ended up giving Jack that tour, not until now. They’ve made it to some of these places in the off-season. Kent points those places out, tries to think of funny anecdotes from day-hikes, lunches out. Another set of cheat codes. Remember me? Remember this? Remember us? 

Jack makes noises at appropriate times. He asks a question when it’s called for. A couple of times, he remembers something: the name of a bookstore, his go-to brunch order. Facts without context, fading in from the deep. For the most part, he lets Kent talk. He’s looking at him more than he’s looking out the window. The groceries are going warm in the trunk. Is it helping? It doesn’t matter, does it. It’s not like Kent will do anything else but try.

After dinner, Kent’s tired enough to get down on the floor. Stretch out. Not like it’s the first time. He lets Kit find a place on his chest, happily kneading her paws into his shirt. There’s a beer within arm’s reach. He’s taken an inch off the top and left the rest of it to sit, going lukewarm and flat.

Jack’s above him, stretched out on the couch. “What were you thinking,” he asks slowly, “when, um. In the hospital. When I—when you left.”

Kent stares at the ceiling because he isn’t ready to look at Jack. “Mostly, I was thinking, I’m not doing this again.” He tries to smile. “But, uh. Here we are.”

“Doing this again,” Jack says. He rolls over so his head is hanging off the couch, looking down at where Kent’s still sprawled on the floor. He’s backlit. It makes it harder to look at him, but not hard enough, really. Kent tries to pretend he doesn’t recognize the look in Jack’s eyes. It doesn’t work.

“Sure,” Kent agrees. It comes out flat. He coughs into his hand, uses it as an excuse to sit up, leaning away from Jack. Kit hops off, slinking across the room for a more stable perch. 

Jack is looking at him, still, a faint wrinkle in his brow. His mouth is bent the way it gets when he watches game tape. There was a time when Jack was a cipher Kent couldn’t crack, but he’s spent three years rewriting the key. He can read Jack now, how he’s looking at Kent as though Kent’s a problem he’s trying to solve.

It’s not a gift. It would hurt less, he thinks, if he could rip up the key, and unlearn what he knows. 

“I’m trying to trust myself,” Jack says. He rubs a hand against his cheek, like there’s something on it. “You make it hard,” he admits, quiet, like he’s sure if he wants Kent to hear it. 

Sure enough to say it so Kent can hear it, though. Kent can feel his mouth creep towards some expression on its own. He says, “Right. Yeah.”

“I don’t mean,” Jack says, a little louder, and then stops.

Kent looks at him. God knows what his face is doing. He’s lost control over it. All these years of media training and it sloughs away when they’re face-to-face. Which usually is fine. It doesn’t feel fine now. 

“What do you mean?” Kent says, when he’s sick of them staring at one another.

“Do you ever regret it?” asks Jack, quiet.

Fast, firm, and—“No." 

The wrinkle in Jack's forehead gets a little deeper. “Do you think I regret it?”

Kent looks away. “No.”

He lies in bed and stares at the ceiling. He rubs a knuckle over his right eye. He can hear the turn of the fan blades; he can hear the ruffling of the air conditioner.

His memory is mostly dedicated to on-ice plays and off-ice mistakes. He’s good at going over mental tape and seeing what went wrong, what he could do differently next time to win. That’s the nice thing about hockey. There’s always a next time. Another game where you can switch up your play, try something different. Write that redemption narrative. 

It’s good for a hockey player to be able to think like that. It’s not as helpful when you’re staring down the replay of your worst moments, surround sound of the shitty things you said to someone and the different, equally shitty things they said back. 

In some ways, Kent would have preferred to get a Jack who hated him, and Jack _had_ hated him for a few years there, he’s pretty sure. Kent had been good with that. Well, not _good_ , but he’d handled it. He’d given Jack space to cool off, because he knew how Jack got when he was furious, all twisted up inside like one of Kit’s disgusting hair balls. Kent knew the play: step back, give him time to hack it up, get it out of his system. Kent had stayed away when Jack was doing his coaching thing with the preteens. He’d only shown up to visit twice, which was two less times than he’d passed out on Jeff’s front lawn. Even that had been too much though, or maybe it hadn’t been enough, who knew? In any case, it hadn’t worked.

For a long time Kent hadn’t really minded being hated. A fair number of people had hated him for being the, you know, the face of a cup-winning team, or for sniping a game winner in gloveside, or even for hooking their franchise lead scorer when he was threatening a breakaway. There were lots of reasons but they were all the same reason. The people who’d hated him were just people who cared a lot about hockey, so they were Kent’s kind of people, at the end of the day. He understood it. Hatred was just another way people showed they cared a lot about what you did.

These days there are plenty of people who hate Kent for reasons that have nothing to do with his hockey. So his feelings on the matter have maybe evolved, in some cases. 

Not in this case, though. This case sucks. This case, the hatred would have been—easier.

Instead he’s got a Jack who’s trying to figure out why it’s worth thinking about Kent at all. But Jack has known Kent since he was sixteen, and truth be told Kent hasn’t really changed much since then. Jack knows him better than pretty much anyone else, even if his information is several years out of date. Kent doesn’t have any character growth or hidden depths or whatever. He’s not the one who went to college and discovered himself. He’s just been here.

He remembers 2015, 2016, and how Jack felt about him then: how Jack didn’t care. It was a treat, something for Kent to torture himself with on special occasions. He pulled it out like a party trick. 

It took him a while, but in the end he’d learned his lesson. He stopped pressing on the bruise. It wasn’t going to do anything apart from hurt, and not a good hurt, not the burn of a muscle getting stronger or the ache in your legs the day after a win in double-OT. There were less embarrassing ways to feed that feeling. 

Then the less embarrassing option had blown up in his face.

After that, he’d lost his taste for it entirely. Too much of a bad thing. Kent can fuck with a little bit of pain—he plays hockey for a living—but he’s not a masochist and never has been. 

This is like that: too much. The Jack in his house that’s never been his to have.

Jack got over it, eventually. Whatever it was that was keeping him from feeling the way Kent felt, even though he had, he _had_ , once upon a time. Obviously he got over it. Kent doesn’t know why or how. It doesn’t seem like something he had very much to do with. 

Jack likes Kent pretty well, now. Kent just wishes he’d remember why.

**Author's Note:**

> you can also find me [on tumblr](http://tulakhord.tumblr.com/). :)


End file.
